


in my dreams i like us better (i am bold, and you are honest)

by moonbeatblues



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, hey so how bout that guide huh, i know this to be true, listen something happened with the exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:20:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23186905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: The body is a vessel. This she knows. It is a harbor for the soul, an imperfect and fleeting thing that contains something moving forever towards perfection.This she knows.But Quana looks at Leylas, her partner, her love, her queen, and thinks that this may be the loveliest version of Leylas Kryn, yet.(about the queen and her captain)
Relationships: Leylas Kryn | The Bright Queen/Quana Kryn, put this tag in cowards
Comments: 4
Kudos: 40





	in my dreams i like us better (i am bold, and you are honest)

**Author's Note:**

> hmmmmm why is there no tag for these two
> 
> lyrics from paradise at last by mothers-- JUST realized it suits them pretty painfully (besides the uh. the no cars)

“Leylas. Leylas, please.”

She’s having nightmares again.

(The body is a vessel. This she knows. It is a harbor for the soul, an imperfect and fleeting thing that contains something moving forever towards perfection.

This she knows.

But Quana looks at Leylas, her partner, her love, her queen, and thinks that this may be the loveliest version of Leylas Kryn, yet.

There is no one alive who knows what Leylas Kryn looked like, who Leylas Kryn was when the first beacon was found.

There are records, deep below the earth, of the person known as Kryn.

Usurper, they call her. Blasphemer.

“The Bright Queen is not a title I gave myself,” she tells Quana, after she has returned to her the second time. She’s shorter, so much smaller— Quana teases her, most days, about it, but for now she can wrap around her, hold her staid and together. “They called me that the first time I went to the surface— I saw the sun and went blind, for three days.”

“The bright queen, builder of a blinding city— it was meant to denote a fool’s errand. An impossible dream.”

She shakes, in Quana’s arms, then.

“But I have dreamed the impossible, and now I am awake.” Leylas’s new body is now twice removed from her scars, twice removed from the signs where her body has been made to break for her treason, and so it shows only in her eyes, her voice, her hands as they form tight fists and tremble. “And they are the ones in the dark.”

There is no planned excavation to recover the records.)

Leylas reaches for her arms where Quana holds her by the face, slow at first and then in a vicelike grip.

_“Please_ ,” she just says. “Please.”

“I’m here, my light,” she says, leans over her. “What do you need?”

“I—"

And then she sits up.

“I can feel it,” she breathes. Her hair is sweated to her forehead in places, falling into her open mouth. _No one sees a leader like this,_ Quana thinks. Here, in the dark and quiet of their room, she is only ever fragile, and she slumps against Quana like the fight has gone from her again. “The missing ones. It cries out for them.”

“Leylas—"

“That I have you, to help me bring them home,” Leylas says into her neck, “can only be ordained. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

She feels the wet of tears when they start to fall, sliding down her collarbone and staining her gown.

“You don’t have to,” she says, tips her head against Leylas’s. “I will not go from you.”

_I wouldn’t have to be ordained,_ she thinks, _to want to help. I would love you this much were we farmers, this time around_. But this is treason.

She gets Leylas to sleep again, waits until she knows it’s peaceful, and then Quana dreams of the warrior Leylas Kryn in the encampment just below the ruins of the betrayer city.

The light from above filters through more fully now— they have tunnels made, now— it’s real, now, what they’re doing. What they’re making.

“Kryn,” he says, watching him pace, and Kryn turns to look at him.

He’s not tall, for a soldier. _I take what body the Luxon gives me_ , Kryn tells him, _and I make of it what we require._

“Yes?”

“Are you afraid?”

Kryn regards him for a long moment, comes and sits heavily beside him outside the tent.

“Yes.”

He says it like it’s dragged from him. Kryn isn’t wearing his armor, now, but it seems to him that he’s always wearing it, always weighed down, always rigid. Never admitting to eyes the softer things beneath. Never, that is, except to him.

“We have the shard. There’s that, at least.”

“Yes, I—" and he knows it’s the wrong thing to say when Kryn schools his face again. “Yes. If we fail, we will try again. I do not forget that gift.”

_I didn’t think you had,_ he wants to say. _How could you possibly? Who are you proving yourself to?_

“I like this body,” he says instead, reaches out to touch Kryn’s face, and Kryn leans into it immediately, huffs out a breath. “It would be a shame to see it go so soon.”

Kryn expects him not to understand, he thinks. There’s an imperfection Kryn sees in him that he sees in everyone. It bothers him, some days, but others he thinks that Kryn likes to see it, and so he’ll pretend it’s a little more selfish. That he won’t wait for Kryn again like he has once, like he won’t do the same thing Kryn has promised. _I will take what body the Luxon gives you,_ he thinks, _and love as you require_.

“Ah,” Kryn says, and blushes. "I’ll— I’ll do my best.”

—

It has been a long time since Quana has seen the ocean— a lifetime, at least, Leylas does not like to leave the city these days.

_(The eyes of the people are on you,_ she thinks, watching Leylas duck her head to put on the mantle. _How heavy they must be._

Every so often she convinces Leylas to join her outside the Bastion. _It’s a god who lives in a cathedral_ , she says, _not a priest,_ and the look in Leylas’s eyes at that scares her. They walk the hedge maze, or just the district, under guises, and Leylas seems so small, every time.)

It would not be safe for the Bright Queen to attend. Not in times like these, with people like these. This Quana knows— she takes pride in her role. Dusk Captain is not a position, in the same way the Bright Queen is not the name of a monarch. It’s something Leylas called her, and has not stopped. It’s an action she performs.

She knows this, and yet, she wishes Leylas were here to see the water.

_The war is over,_ she thinks, as she takes the beacon. Maybe she can convince Leylas to come a little farther.

She thinks of Leylas holding up her skirts— not the mithril ones, no, the faint gauzy ones she’d bought her one particularly hot summer, holding up her skirts and stepping into the shallows. It’s night, in her mind’s eye, the sea rendered black and glassy under the moons, and Leylas seems to glow under it, not with the Luxon’s perfect light but as herself, off-white and messy and fierce.

Then, there is a flash of light from her hands and she stops thinking altogether.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm @seafleece on tumblr! come say hi, i'm freaking out about egtw rn


End file.
